"Handwashing rose, then fell, during COVID-19"

[dutchman]

‘We’re still in the pandemic, and people are not washing their hands as much anymore. They’ve gone back to their baseline.’



Healthcare workers washed their hands more diligently in the pandemic’s early months but quickly reverted back to their normal hand-hygiene behavior, says a new study — and the findings have implications for patients and laypeople too.

Hand-hygiene compliance among staff at the University of Chicago Medical Center, as measured by the hospital’s automated system for monitoring hand sanitizer and soap use, reached as high as 100% on March 28, 2020, according to a recent research letter in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine — before declining to a daily low of 51.5% by Aug. 15.

That August saw a monthly low of 56%. Prior to COVID-19, monthly compliance was close to September 2019’s baseline of 54.5%, the study said.

(This study supports earlier research by the American Cleaning Institute on the overall population, which found a 14-percentage point decline in handwashing last September compared to the start of the pandemic.)

“We found that hand hygiene went up naturally and astronomically above our greatest aspirations during the beginning of the pandemic, but also naturally fell back to about our normal level of hand hygiene within just a couple months,” said study co-author Emily Landon, the executive medical director of infection prevention and control at University of Chicago Medicine.

In other words, the good news is “we figured out how to get people to wash their hands: a pandemic,” Landon told MarketWatch. “The bad news is that that didn’t last — we’re still in the pandemic, and people are not washing their hands as much anymore. They’ve gone back to their baseline.”